The blog has been quiet, and I doubt I will make much of a splash this week as I’m hip-deep in backlogged tasks and am mostly focused on fending off impending doom.

So apologies for interrupting this blessedly tranquil stretch with a bit of personal boasting. Yesterday I was easily convinced to skip the Grey Cup on TV for a trip to Hastings Racetrack to catch the last four races with my boy Harry and buddy Doug. (Made possible only by a brief reprieve from the crap weather we’ve been having.)

I tend to be a very conservative bettor, small amounts on the favorite horses… so I rarely lose much money, but rarely do better than breaking even. Yesterday I tried a slightly different tack, instead laying my meager bets on exactas (ie picking the top two finishers, in order, with significantly higher odds) in the last three races…

So thank you Ghost Pirate (picked by Harry for the name) and Long Journey in the 7th, Johney Brocc and Alpha Danjur in the 8th, and Fraser Canyon and American Poet in the 9th. Had none of you come in I would have lost about ten bucks. As it happened, I cleared a cool hundred. That’s right, I picked three exactas in a row. It was all I could do not to tell everyone I saw on the way home about it.

So yes, a dull and pointless blog post… but some things happen only once in a lifetime. I just hope this wasn’t one of them.

2 thoughts on “A day at the races…”

True enough, though most of the horses were fairly strong favorites. And I wasn’t doubling up each bet — I was laying out 2-4 bucks per race. And I subtracted my beer expenditures to arrive at my net total.

The odds were really low all day, across the board — I wonder if that was a reflection of the small crowd that was on-hand.

That said, there were a few incidents through the day that reinforced that sense of genial corruption, a feeling that is just one of the great things about racetracks.